chatbot_steps_one2many

A chatbot script is built one step at a time, and steps refer to each other: a later step can be conditional on an answer given in an earlier one. That only works if the earlier step exists in the database, which means the script has to be saved before the next step can reference it.

Left to the standard behavior, that would mean saving the form between every step, which is tedious and easy to forget. This widget removes the step by saving the whole script itself every time a step is saved.

It also freezes the ordering. The list is meaningful only in sequence order, so sorting by any column is switched off rather than left available to confuse the builder.

Chatbot builders live or die on how quickly a script can be assembled. Every extra click between steps is multiplied by the number of steps, and a fifteen step script is not unusual. Removing the save is the difference between building one in a sitting and abandoning it half done.

The trade is that the script is committed continuously, so there is no version of the form you can discard wholesale. In a builder that is the right choice, because the work is additive and nobody expects to throw away an hour of it, but it is worth telling a team who expect a draft.

The frozen ordering is a small thing with the same intent. A sorted view of a sequence is not a useful view of it, and offering the sort only invites someone to break their own mental model of the script.

The core usage, trimmed

<field name="script_step_ids"
       widget="chatbot_steps_one2many" nolabel="1">
  <list>
    <field name="sequence" widget="handle"/>
    ...
  </list>
</field>

The handle column is how steps are reordered, since sorting by any column is disabled.

What happens on each step save

# the step is written, then
props.record.save()   # the whole script

Which is what lets the next step reference the one just added.

The ordinary child list

<field name="script_step_ids">
  <list> ... </list>
</field>

Sortable columns and no automatic save, which means saving the script by hand between steps.

The widget has two parts and each is small.

The renderer subclass walks the field definitions when it starts and switches off sorting on every one, with a comment explaining that the list must remain sorted on its sequence at all times. That is a blunter approach than declaring the columns unsortable in the view, and it has the advantage of covering columns added by other modules.

The field component rebuilds the open-record helper so that the save of a step is followed by a save of the enclosing record. It does this by taking the standard create and update helpers, wrapping the create one, and constructing the dialog opener on top of the wrapped pair. The comment above it names the benefit: the user can chain steps without saving the form in between.

Note the asymmetry: the wrapping is applied to the save path and not to the update path, so editing an existing step does not force a script save the same way creating one does.

The last touch is focus. The widget remembers which element had focus before the dialog opened and restores it when the dialog closes, which keeps keyboard-driven building working across a long script.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026. The development branch is unstable and this may still change; we re-verify the page after release.

Byte-identical. The file on the development branch matches Odoo 19 exactly, including the forced save and the disabled sorting.

Worth knowing alongside it: the answers widget used on the step form is removed on that branch, so the builder as a whole changes even though this widget does not.